Unless otherwise indicated herein, approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims listed below and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Modern electronic apparatuses with display capability tend to consume relatively large amount of power due to factors such as high display resolution, large display panel size, multi-core processing and high operation frequency. Meanwhile there is a continuously pursuit for low thermal cost and small form factors (e.g., slimness and thinness) for portable electronic apparatuses such as smartphones. Software-based thermal management is an approach to rearrange the usage of system resources of an electronic apparatus to achieve a balance between skin temperature of the electronic apparatus (e.g., smartphone) and performance thereof while protecting components of the electronic apparatus from damage due to high temperature. Nevertheless, existing designs of software-based thermal management typically seek maximizing system performance within thermal limits at the expense of user experience (e.g., a side effect of “frame lag” in a content being displayed may result). For example, one conventional approach maintains the temperature of chip die and skin within respective thermal limits by throttling the frequency of a central processing unit (CPU) and/or a graphics processing unit (GPU) of the electronic apparatus. The conventional approach aims to control the system power so as not to cause the temperatures of components and skin of the electronic apparatus to exceed their respective limits. However, the conventional approach tends not to take into account display frame rate, or the smoothness thereof, in controlling the system power under an over-temperature condition even though the smoothness of display frame rate is an important factor to user experience.